Share This article

Yesterday, we covered the debut of Medfield, Intel’s first 32nm smartphone chip — but Intel isn’t the only company making waves in new markets. Qualcomm is planning its own push into the mainstream PC space, with help from Windows 8.

Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm’s CEO, claims the company’s chips will deliver a new type of experience for users. “Your next PC will deliver an always-on, always-connected experience … something we in the mobile industry know something about,” he told CES attendees.

The point is arguable, given the prevalence of WiFi hotspots, and the idea of paying AT&T or another cellular vendor for tethering or an additional data plan isn’t the coolest idea we’ve ever heard, either. Nitpicks aside, Qualcomm believes it’s found fertile ground for its upcoming Snapdragon S4 “Krait” processors; Jacobs claims there are 70 non-phone devices in the pipeline.

The company is demonstrating Snapdragon S4 chips running Windows 8 at the show, but the impact of such devices needs to be taken in context. It’s true that ARM-powered Windows 8 netbooks could take a chunk of the x86 market, but rumors that they’d threatenIntel’s ultrabooks are based on a poor understanding of the relevant technologies. As things stand, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 is more a threat to AMD than Intel.

AMD’s mobile gains in the past year have all been in the lower end of the market. Dual-core S4s aren’t likely to challenge Llano — the gap is still too wide — but could be ammunition against Brazos, particularly since the next generation of that processor had to be rearchitected from scratch.

Windows 8 isn’t expected to have much of an impact on 2012, if any, but come 2013 we’ll start to see increased overlap between ARM and x86 devices. The ramp up will be slower — none of the ARM vendors have announced the sort of 10-15W parts that AMD and Intel are planning to deliver — but we expect to see these sort of chips evolve as the two architectures merge.

Tagged In

Post a Comment

Ilya Kalujny

That stuff above is a bit biased. It puts Intel on the top of mobile computing, while the reality is a bit more complicated. To put it short, Intel has the CPU processing crown, while AMD rules in the graphics department, so its a tie.

However, ARM is no threat to Intel in the lower end of the market, because Intel has virtually no presence there – you`d be hard pressed to justify an Intel Atom powered netbook purchase over a Brazos powered one.

In the end, the news are ultimately good since ARM only adds to the competition, giving us more of a choice. 2012 is going to be an interesting year.

http://pip99.livejournal.com/ TechU

something to also consider, ARM do not mess around, if there’s an unfilled market segment they and their partners make it happen and have done for many years

That said, the advanced partners know only too well that memory bandwidth is key. New technologies like Wide I/O will be adopted and increases in available memory bandwidth will become available to support the needs of higher performance CPUs and GPUs, including those capable of 64-bit addressing.High-performance graphics is all about moving data efficiently (using as little bandwidth as possible and using as little power as possible).

With ARM’s heritage in low-power, Mali GPUs show technical leadership in this area. Announcements such as ARM’s new texture compression standard ASTC, show how we are leading the industry. Added to existing ARM technologies such as Transaction Elimination and others that we haven’t yet announced, you can be confident that we will continue to use the lowest bandwidth (and consequent SoC power).”

“Jem is an ARM Fellow and likes to think of himself as “The Godfather” to technical talent in ARM…..”

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.